India After Gandhi

A balanced and unfailingly insightful work

"You British believe in fair play," a Punjabi official told an English visitor at the time of Indian independence. "You have left India in the same condition of chaos as you found it."

Indeed, the country inherited by the Congress party in 1947 was a bewildering patchwork of territories, including 500 princely states, many of them dead set against joining the union. India's population was predominantly illiterate. There were 800 languages, but no common tongue. And in the wake of partition, Hindus and Muslims were cutting each other's throats, prompting the "greatest mass migration in history" with 8m refugees fleeing from Pakistan alone.

Few western observers believed that this fledgling nation could survive intact for long. "India will fall back . . . into the barbarism and privations of the Middle Ages," sneered Winston Churchill.

The story of how India proved its many detractors wrong is one rarely given much attention in Britain,